Regulatory and Financial Incentives for Scaling Up Concentrating Solar Power in Developing Countries

Concentrating solar thermal (CST) technologies have a clear potential for scaling up renewable energy at the utility level, thereby diversifying the generation portfolio mix, powering development, and mitigating climate change. A recent surge in demand for solar thermal power generation projects in several World Bank Group (WBG) partner countries shows that CST could indeed become an important renewable energy technology that would be able to provide an alternative to conventional thermal power generation based on the central utility model. At present, different CST technologies have reached varying degrees of commercial availability. This emerging nature of CST means that there are market and technical impediments to accelerating its acceptance, including cost competitiveness, an understanding of technology capability and limitations, intermittency, and benefits of electricity storage. Many developed and some developing countries are currently working to address these barriers in order to scale up CST-based power generation. Given the considerable growth of CST development in several WBG partner countries, there is a need to assess the recent experience of developed countries in designing and implementing regulatory frameworks and draw lesson that could facilitate the deployment of CST technologies in developing countries. Merely replicating developed countries' schemes in the context of a developing country may not generate the desired outcomes